RPG Maker

A few day ago, I play LonaRPG. A game about survival and journey of a girl that lost her hometown due plagues. This game for me quite difficult yet interesting.

Lona, the protagonist can fight monster, birth a child or rebirth as another race and etc. The story is quite dark and gory, this gore game by the way, and hilarious there some kind gallow humour in it. What make different that another RPG game I usually played is the battle is real-time attack, not turn-based or grid based combat.

Moving on, the game itself create using RPG Maker the specific edition I can not sure but the game has been exist since 2019 so it maybe use MV edition. Since this game engine low-code, less code and more creating not too hard.

Game Engine for RPG

rpg maker mv edition cover

I have bought RMMV (RPG Maker MV edition) arount mid 2023 when summer sales, USD $30 iirc. I rarely used because busy with another stuff such college task and burnout about it. This year I was plannig to mastering RMMV to create my first game. The latest version are RMMZ, but my laptop cannot afford the minimum specification.

RPG Maker is game engine for creating role-playing game which already include assets and built-in mechanic such level/exp mechanic, battle system, inventory and save/load function.

There two building block in RPG Maker, Maps and Events:

  • Map is visual player will see, the world of the games, so in the world there various event will occur. In some game engine this equivalent as scenes.

  • Event is logic building block inside map, We create and event to handle what will happend when our player interact with it or automatically run, the latter usually used for cutscene and credit roll.

So the games is collection of combination from maps and events. That will driven by player interaction with it.

What inside it?

Now, I want to show you what it look like when working.

rmmv load a project game that ready to create

This may look like drawing tool such paint or aseprite or tiled, yes it is.

  • The right big pane is our game world, everything we put there will shown in the game. What lies in the middle is player position event in the map.
  • The left upper pane is tileset, a collection of tile such terrain texture, object or wall that we will put into the map.
  • The left lower pane is the map collection, we choose and select map which we want working for.

The also tool bar that I give red underline, that is map edit mode.

  • The left one (which like brown T in green), meaning the map is tileset mode. We edit the tile in the map.
  • The right one (red pawn), is the event mode. This mean we can adding event to the map such NPC, interaction with item, transfer player to another map and etc. Tip: when in event mode, using right clik in the map help you with event creation shortcut.

Moving on to tool bar with blue underline, this place for assets and game database.

  • Cogs icon is game database. That where you modify your player, configuring which level or how the game configured to satifies our wish, in other like Project Properties.

  • Puzzle icon is plugin menu. Plugin help you extend the game function and capabilities with programming (Javascript which used). There a lot of great plugin you can use, I recommended to try Yanfly's Starter Pack Essentials plugins.

  • Speaker icon is audio library, simply to test audio that suite with current map or event like cutscence.

  • Magnify glass, Event search, when you want to find which event ties with switch or variable.

  • Folder icon, is Resource Manager, this feature I found kinda use full for you importing your asset into the game project which help you for copying the asset manually into the game folder.

  • Person icon, is Charater Generator. It provide basic character that help us to bootstraping our character and delegate the drawing part for sprites.

The last is what I give black underline at toolbar is Playtest button. To run your game.

Resource and Help

RPG maker is rich of community tutorial and advice especially at forums. The in-app documentation (click Help > Content / press F1) quite helping there explanation about the software feature and Javascript API documenation for creating plugins.

Here various link that I found useful for RPGMaker related resource:

Pro tip: When you very first open RPG Maker and no idea how it works, Look at toolbar click Help > Tutorial. That interactive guide will show you the basic idea of how to use RPG Maker.

Conclusion

The RPG Maker is great tool in game dev I have ever use especially with story-driven game. I found this worth it my bucks.

But this not about bright side, there also dark side I tell you.

RPG Maker is quite expensive and the company had serious thing to do to milking our wallet with the DLCs, also there various third-party paid plugin. No wonder this commercial propertiary software thou. Also beware that tools that claim will worth it but it false claim and hurt your wallet.

Remember finish your game first, then polish with accessories/cosmetics latter.